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Perhaps the key forecast: Mobile traffic will be on the verge of
reaching an annual run rate of a zettabyte by the end of 2022. In
that timeframe, mobile traffic will represent nearly 20 percent
of global IP traffic and will reach 930 exabytes annually –
nearly 113 times more than all mobile traffic generated globally
in 2012. (An exabyte is 1,000,000,000 gigabytes and a zettabyte
is 1,000 exabytes.)

The Cisco Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update is part the
company’s overarching Visual
Networking Index (VNI) that tracks and forecasts all
manner of networking trends and directions culled from its own
network traffic reports and independent analyst forecasts.

Other mobility predictions from Cisco:

By 2022, there will be more than 12 billion mobile-ready
devices and IoT connections,
up from about 9 billion in 2017.

By 2022, mobile networks will support more than 8 billion
personal mobile devices and 4 billion IoT connections.

The average mobile network speeds globally will increase more
than three-fold from 8.7Mbps in 2017 to 28.5Mbps by 2022.

By 2022, mobile video will represent 79 percent of global
mobile data traffic, up from 59 percent in 2017.

By 2022, 79 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic will
be video, up from 59 percent in 2017.

Mobile offload exceeded cellular traffic by a ton in 2017; 54
percent of total mobile data traffic was offloaded onto the
fixed-line network through Wi-Fi or femtocell in 2017.

In 2017, 4G already carried 72 percent of the total
mobile traffic and represented the largest share of mobile data
traffic by network type. It will continue to grow faster than
other networks, however the percentage share will go down
slightly to 71 percent of all mobile data traffic by 2022.

Wi-Fi offloading to blossom

For this study, Cisco also focused on measuring which
organizations offloaded traffic from dual-mode devices (excluding
laptops) that support both cellular
and Wi-Fi connectivity, for example.

“Offloading occurs at the user or device level when one switches
from a cellular connection to Wi-Fi or small-cell access. Our
mobile offload projections include traffic from both public
hotspots and residential Wi-Fi networks,” Cisco said.

By 2022, 59 percent of global mobile data traffic (cellular)
will be offloaded to Wi-Fi or small cell networks, up from 54
percent in 2017.

By 2022, 51 percent of total IP traffic will be Wi-Fi, 29
percent will be wired, and 20 percent will be mobile (cellular).
In 2017, total IP traffic was 48 percent wired, 43 percent
WiFi, and 9 percent mobile (cellular).

Globally, total public Wi-Fi hotspots (including homespots)
will grow four-fold from 124 million in 2017 to 549 million by
2022.

In 2022 the average Wi-Fi connection speed will be 54.2 Mbps,
up 2.2 times from 2017 to 2022.

Wi-Fi 6 – aka 802.11ax – will also be a factor in
future installations, bringing with it a host of upgrades aimed
at simplifying wireless network problems, Cisco said. Wi-Fi 6
supports multi-user, multiple-input, multiple-output (MU-MIMO)
technology, meaning that a given access point can handle traffic
from up to eight users at the same time and at the same speed.
Previous-generation APs still divide their attention and
bandwidth among simultaneous users.

Wi-Fi 6 will also support larger constellations of low-powered
IoT devices using fewer access points. The reliably deterministic
nature of Wi-Fi 6 combined with its speed means it should be
usable for life-safety applications, such as remote surgery
devices, said Anand Oswal, senior vice
president of engineering in Cisco’s Enterprise Networking
Business recently.

5G is looming big

While mobility and WiFi trends were two of the biggest items in
the Cisco study, 5G directions made up a significant
part of the report.

“The full value and transformational capabilities of 5G cannot
simply be measured by performance improvements over 4G (higher
bandwidth, broader coverage, and lower latency),” wrote Thomas
Barnett, director of Cisco’s service-provider thought
leadership in
a blog about the report. “5G will also deliver enhanced power
efficiency, cost optimization, massive IoT connection density and
dynamic allocation of resources based on awareness of content,
user, and location.”

5G will be able to concurrently support both low-end IoT
applications, such as sensors and meters, as well as high-end IoT
applications, such as autonomously driven cars, Barnett wrote.

The study said 5G growth will be driven by IoT
applications – sensors and meters on the low end to
autonomous cars on the high end. Awareness of conent, user and
location will determine how 5G resources are allocated. "This
technology is expected to solve frequency licensing and spectrum
management issues. Large scale commercial deployments are not
expected until the latter years of the current forecast,” Cisco
said.

Some other 5G facts:

By 2022, 5G connections will represent over three percent of
total mobile connections and will account for nearly 12 percent
of global mobile data traffic.

By 2022, the average 5G connection (22 GB/month) will
generate nearly three times more traffic than the average 4G
connection (8 GB/month).

By 2022, 4G connections will be 54.3 percent of total mobile
connections, compared to 34.7 percent in 2017. The global mobile
4G connections will grow from 3 billion in 2017 to 6.7 billion by
2022 at a CAGR of 18 percent. 5G connections will appear on the
scene in 2019 and will grow several thousand percent from under
half a million in 2019 to over 400 million by 2022.

IP traffic explosion

In its most recent VNI update Cisco said it foresees a
massive buildup of IP traffic – 4.8 zettabytes per year by 2022,
which is over three times the 2017 rate – lead by the increase in
IoT traffic and video. The company also says there will be
4.8 billion internet users by 2022, up from 3.4 billion in 2017.

The VNI predicts an explosion of machine-to-machine (M2M) and IoT
traffic. For example M2M modules account for 3.1 percent of IP
traffic in 2017, but will be 6.4 percent of IP traffic by 2022.
By 2022, M2M connections will be 51 percent of the total devices
and connections on the internet.